


Skinful

by ZeelosRN



Series: The Only Thing in the World [1]
Category: A Charm of Magpies Series - K. J. Charles
Genre: Age Difference, Canon Compliant, During Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-07 20:21:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17372660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZeelosRN/pseuds/ZeelosRN
Summary: "Do I bollocks. Had a skinful, that's all." --A Case of SpiritsJenny Saint and Frank Merrick's story, starting from when they meet in Case of Possession.





	1. Saint and Killer

Frank Merrick was used to dealing with dangerous people, as allies and as enemies. Even here in England, where he'd had to rebuild his reputation from nearly scratch and without killing anyone who'd be missed, he understood the different forms of power and how to place himself. He was used to being underestimated and overlooked, as was only natural when he spent so much time standing next to Lucien Vaudrey, and as was quite helpful in its own way in some circles. Vaudrey got some kind of thrill out of sticking his cock in people who might kill him, which Merrick thank God did not. On the contrary, he liked that soft look women got when they saw he was dangerous, as long as they didn't run away. But just because the prospect of getting himself killed didn't turn him on, didn't mean it unsettled him too much, either. He had plenty of dealings with people who were more likely to drop him than the reverse. Dropped some of 'em, too, come to that.

But his strategy for handling shaman trouble, up until April, had been to hire a shaman to deal with it, and being in a room with three of them, two of them strangers and officers of the law at that, made him nervous. The man, Mr. Janossi, he thought he could peg, a bad sort to have coming after you face-on but easy enough to distract or surprise. The woman, Mrs. Gold, made his hackles stand up. Vaudrey could charm ladies if he wanted, but he didn't usually want, and even when he put on his company manners he tended to piss off the types with something to prove. If Mr. Day hadn't had a taste for sarcasm and high-handedness, they might have been a heap of ashes by now. Mrs. Gold probably had a sense of humor, but it didn't run to beautiful native sorceresses, and while Merrick figured she probably wouldn't lower herself to actually murder Vaudrey over a stupid joke, he wasn't sure but she could make trouble other ways. Nor did he like that it was Mr. Day, rather than himself, who stood between Vaudrey and danger. So he told his half of the story about the damned rats, hoping this apparently professional encounter was going to earn them some useful contacts instead of some very dangerous enemies, trying to keep everything normal and hoping Mrs. Gold wasn't noticing how careful her partner and Vaudrey were being to keep their distance from each other. Mr. Janossi, he figured, wouldn't have a clue.

Mr. Janossi looked round when there was nothing there. "Here's Saint coming," Mrs. Gold said, a few seconds before someone knocked on the door. Merrick snapped his manservant expression firmly into place, because maybe his plan for dealing with practitioners by sneaking up behind them had some problems. He accordingly opened the door as impassively as the butler Society expected Vaudrey to want, and was a little startled when the expected Saint was female, small, in her late teens, and worse-dressed than even the egregious Mr. Day. He'd expected the same sturdy respectability affected by Mr. Janossi and Mrs. Gold. In fact, this was the message-runner who'd taken Vaudrey to meet the others, whom Merrick had assumed was just the most responsible-looking urchin in sight when they needed a note sent over. Her eyes had gone just a little wide at the sight of him. Now that he knew she was one of  _ them _ , he could see the telltale intensity in the blue, unless he was putting something there that wasn't. He gave her a little bow. "Miss Saint? This way, please."

Damn him if the little wench didn't shoot both her eyebrows up at being greeted like gentry, and bow right back at him, with a grand flutter of her hands. She practically sashayed past him to where the others waited. She had fuck all for a figure, skinny little animal that she was, but she moved like she liked having muscles on her bones. Merrick felt suddenly about as small and graceful as the elephant on his back, which usually wouldn't have bothered him. He followed her into the office, wondering, not for the first time, when exactly he'd gotten old.

Watching Miss Saint with Mrs. Gold didn't make him feel any younger. He had a solid ten years on Mrs. Gold at the very least, probably more like fifteen, and Miss Saint clearly respected the other woman as a revered elder and possibly a mother. Merrick, whose own mother had been an ordinary creature of floury aprons and warnings not to climb too high in trees, had a deal of trouble picturing Mrs. Gold in the role. Naturally Miss Saint's respect, like his own, was well-leavened with rolled eyes and smirks, but he saw the flickering wince of pain under the grin when Mrs. Gold told her not to get into trouble. He was grateful as hell when Vaudrey told him the same, putting them on a level. And then they were leaving together, and somehow he'd gotten assigned to walk the streets of Limehouse with an urchin. He stuck an extra cosh in his pocket before they left.

Miss Saint made no bones about eyeing him up as they parted from Mrs. Gold and Mr. Janossi. "So are you a fancy butler or a val-lett or what?" she asked.

Merrick shrugged. "Manservant," he said, figuring as he could expand on that later if it was worth it. "You a shaman peeler like Mr. Day?"

She spit off to the side. He judged she was being deliberately vulgar to put him off. "Justiciary's not exactly like the peelers. Lot less of us, for one. What's a shaman?"

"Magician. Your sort. That's the Chinese word."

"Shaman. His lordship said that. Right. How come you speak Chinese, then? You ain't a Chinaman."

"Lived in Shanghai for twenty years, though. You pick things up." As they drew away from the offices, where he and Vaudrey were recognized, he let his stride take on the rhythm of the Shanghai cage fighter. He had no real concerns about his safety, or hers if her job was anything like Mr. Day's, but putting off opportunists with his fists was more time-consuming than letting them know not to try. He and Miss Saint didn't make obvious targets, but his clothes were just a touch too tidy for these streets. It was always a balancing act, picking out what to wear, when Vaudrey might need him to visit competitors' offices, or break some kneecaps, or both. Although there had been less kneecaps since April. Vaudrey hadn't gone soft to speak of, but he was tacking a little closer to the windy side of the law on account of Mr. Day seemed to care. In any case, even dressed for brawling, Merrick would have been too clean for the depths of Limehouse. Miss Saint had acquired some impressive dirt somewhere, including what he was pretty sure was old blood on her cuffs, but he'd washed up this morning and done nothing dirtier than chat with some dock hands since then. More's the pity.

Miss Saint was looking at him again out of the corner of her eye. "Manservant, huh," she said.

He smiled, neither the really threatening one nor the really friendly one. "Cook, valet, keep the household accounts, put the fear of God in those as think they can cheat my lord, smell out reasonable business opportunities, go home and do the laundry." Merrick took great satisfaction in his life. He liked seeing things done right, he liked hurting people who deserved it, and he liked having a friend around he could insult when he wanted. The fact that he could make an omelet as would break your heart made him no less of a man, to his mind, than the fact that he knew just how to get a knife through the ribs and break a heart that way, and he took no less pride in the one than the other.

Miss Saint laughed. "How's the pay?"

It was surprising how few of his acquaintances ever thought to ask. The China hands, of course, probably had some idea, but most of them assumed he drew a generous salary, as any other murderous henchman might. "He don't pay me. I don't pay him either, come to that, for all he puts more hours into the business than what I do, and he's a sharp one. What we got, we made together." He grimaced. "Except this new stuff what with his dad dying, of course, but I couldn't spend enough to touch that in a hundred years." The transformation of Vaudrey and Merrick, friends and business partners, to Lord Crane and his devoted servant had not completely shaken itself out. Eight months was longer than Merrick had expected them to last in England, for one thing. He still expected Vaudrey's patience to give out before his own. The finances were tidy, at least, because in the event of one of them getting arrested, the other needed access to enough money to get them both out of the country.

Miss Saint was staring at him.

Merrick shrugged. "Too much trouble to explain, and he's useless in the kitchen. Easier to say I'm his manservant and be done." To himself, Merrick could admit that he lacked Vaudrey's gift for telling everyone else what to do, but he flat refused to say it aloud. He had a superstitious conviction that if he ever did, Vaudrey would happen to be standing behind him and would never let him forget it.

Miss Saint put her face back forward and her chin up. She had a sharp pointy little face, but more like a bird than a rat or a weasel. They were walking through real poverty now, the houses tumbledown and overcrowded, the streets alive with unattended children, some very small. Even Miss Saint looked well-off in comparison. She'd clearly eaten recently. She was skinny, not hollowed-out. "Must be nice," she said finally.

Merrick didn't think she'd appreciate an account of his own experience of poverty, even if they had time. "Yeah," he said, and left it at that.

 

The tenement room where the first shaman had died was not pleasant. The blood wasn't fresh, at least, and someone had made an effort to clean up a bit, but even with a window open it still stank. Blood and shit, the familiar smells of death; and with them rat piss and all the reek of the street outside. The old woman who'd been set to guard the room was Li Tang's aunt and knew Merrick from China. She'd warned him not to disturb the body but made no effort to stop him. Remembering their instructions to be discreet, he strongly implied that the English shamans were just making sure the Chinese rituals worked to prevent hauntings and promised not to spread word around.

He hadn't expected Miss Saint to react to the corpse. She wasn't overwhelmed, at least, but she pulled an exaggerated face as she looked down at it. "Ee-ee-eew. What's that on his face?"

"Smallpox got him, looks like. 'Less you mean the gashes. Or the places where they gnawed on him." There wasn't much face left, really. The scars tickled Merrick's memory, but it was hardly a unique affliction. He had a few pockmarks himself, and it was only luck he hadn't come out looking any worse.

Miss Saint shot a glare at him. "You talk to all the ladies like that?"

He gave her a smirk to match her own, pretty sure giving her a target to snipe at would keep her steadier than offering any kind of comfort. "Only the ones in the dead people business." 

Miss Saint huffed a laugh. "Ain't I just. Fucking job. Well, this bloke died from magic giant rats, and if Mrs. Gold wanted to know more than that she should of come herself or sent Joss. Ready for the next one?"

"I'm just here to translate, Miss. Ready when you are."

"I'm ready to get out of this stink is what I am. Come on." Merrick followed her out into the alley, which smelled only a little better. Only a little breeze stirred the heavy air at all. Miss Saint wrinkled her nose. "You're awful calm."

"We knew what we was like to find." Merrick was beginning to accept magic as something to be dealt with, and he didn't like it. Some of the things he'd seen in April still intruded on his thoughts when he was trying to sleep, but then, so did plenty of things he'd seen before then. "A body's a body, as the whore said to the graverobber."

Miss Saint snorted. "You seen a lot of bodies, then, as a fancy manservant?"

He glanced at her as they walked. Those eyes were a lot older than that face, and the real question meant more than a dig. "Killed my share of folk, back in Shanghai," he said. "Cracked a few skulls as may have healed or may not. Left a couple alive as I wish I hadn't." He'd killed on Vaudrey's say-so more than once, but it was the time he'd refrained because Vaudrey asked that nagged at him. Ah well. "I never killed anyone didn't have it coming, though."

She nodded, a little abstracted-looking, then shook herself as they came to a dead end. "Ah fuck. I lost track of the turns."

"These streets are an eel bucket and no mistake. Want me to ask directions?"

"Don't bother, I'll have a look. We can't be far. Keep an eye out, eh?"

There was no vantage point nearby. The alley twisted, back the way they'd come, so that where they stood they might have been alone in a small room with no ceiling. There was even carpet, if you counted shit and rot. For a moment he expected some sort of spell to make a map, and indeed her eyes were dilating a bit the way shamans' did. But as he moved to the corner where he might have some warning of intruders, he heard the swish of skirts, and he glanced over to see her spring back and forth, like a child playing scotch-hoppers, if the squares were invisible and rose steeply into the air. She was wearing trousers under her skirts, he saw, even in the heat. Made sense, if you could fucking fly.

But she'd asked him to play lookout, and there was no call to speculate about her underthings in any case. He turned around the corner, facing resolutely to the alley.

The men creeping up on him abruptly straightened. For a second they all looked at each other. There were six of them, Chinese, in the mix of workmen's drab clothes and flashy ornaments that suggested low-level membership in one or another criminal organization. No one he recognized, but they were armed with machetes and wary against a lone man, which made him think they either knew of him or knew about Miss Saint or both.

"Hello," he said, starting in English.

They glanced at each other, apparently electing a spokesman. "You're the white devil working for Li Tang," the man said. It wasn't Shanghainese, some dialect from farther north and west, but Merrick recognized enough words to make do.

He shook his head. "I work for Lord Crane," he said.

"We want to know what Li Tang's up to with the shamans," the spokesman said. The six of them were fanning out, blocking the alley, leaving each other just enough room to swing.

"You'll have to ask Li Tang." Merrick judged his odds were pretty good. He was outnumbered, of course, but he had a wall for his back, an assortment of knives and the cosh in his pocket, and no sense that any of these idiots had brought a firearm. Even if he hadn't had an ace in the hole--or the sky, as the case might be--the situation wouldn't have worried him. "No need to throw a party on my account."

"We're asking you."

Merrick was wondering just how long they intended to drag this out, and whether he in fact needed to hit first on the chance they were a distraction, when all the dust at the ruffians' feet burst upward in a cloud and the air made a deep  _ foom _ noise. A second later there was a sort of extended crunchy thud as all six of them slammed into a wall. Their machetes landed with a clang.

Merrick let the silence sit for a moment as the men sorted themselves out, wide-eyed and too scared to curse. "Did I mention Lord Crane is friends with some English shamans?" he said, finally.

Miss Saint touched down next to him as the would-be bravos ran. Her eyes were aglow like a winter sky. "Nice of them to line up like that and hold still for my shot," she said. "Might of had to get my hands dirty otherwise."

"Nah," Merrick said. "Unless you wanted."

She gave him a great big  _ oh _ face. "Well sorr-ee, Mister Scary Killer Man. I can let you show off for me next time."

Merrick snorted. "I don't fight for audiences anymore," he said. "You want me to show off, pick something else I'm good at." As she twitched her face away again, he realized that sounded like innuendo. As if he was going to flirt with a little girl. "Give me a really filthy basket of laundry," he said, and that worked well enough to get her to laugh. They walked on in silence, though, and he was conscious that his thoughts of soaking and mending that hideous dress she was wearing were too damned close to thoughts of how she might look without it. Shit. He was due to talk to a new lady as soon as he could find one, and eyeing up girls was a pretty sorry state to be in. His most recent respectable widow, Qian Fa-liu, gone home to help her daughter now, had been sharp-tongued, steel-spined, and seventy years old, much older than he usually would have looked at twice, but better company than women half her age. She wouldn't have flinched at corpses, either.

 

***

 

Mr. Merrick was wreaking havoc on Saint's picture of how the world worked, and she was angry at him for it. For example, as a child she'd learned to rank grown-ups by threat, and she'd never grown out of the habit, since most people were still bigger or stronger than her in one way or another, and her best skill was getting away. Mr. Day, despite being able to pull power out of the ether easier than anyone she'd ever met, and kill without hesitation when he decided it was warranted, had been no threat to her at all when they met. Not because of his size, either, which was a fucking stupid reason to overlook someone, and Mr. Day was half an inch taller than Saint anyway, damn him. He was kind, or tried to be, and the only reason he was a threat to her now was that she was lonely enough to care what he thought and he kept humiliating her by accident. In contrast, Mr. Maupert the resonance teacher was a nasty small-minded man, willing to use his rank and authority for petty cruelties and careful to stay just short of what would earn him attention from Mrs. Gold. Saint had been known to sabotage Joss on occasion to keep from having to go to tutoring sessions alone.

She couldn't place Mr. Merrick on that scale, and it was nagging at her. What kind of man had all that money and didn't act like it? Saint's ideas of what she would do with a fortune ran to a small castle with lots of towers, plenty of coal to keep warm, a cook who would always have biscuits in a jar, and, when she wasn't just building the dream to try to get to sleep, maybe seeing if any of the other children she'd used to run with were still alive and setting them up in luxury, too. If Mr. Merrick could take more and didn't, did that make him safer or less safe?

She couldn't read his face, much, either. He was tanned darker than some Chinamen and his nose looked like it had been broken repeatedly, and he had the deep wrinkles by his eyes that Saint knew came from too much pain. Walking down the street he sort of half-sneered, but that was just an act, the same way he swaggered. When he laughed- the thing was, when he laughed, his face didn't stop being a killer's face, but he looked genuinely happy at the same time, and Saint wasn't sure what that meant at all.

The first corpse had been bad enough. This second place was worse. The building was a burned wreck, for one thing, not anything to do with their business, but burned months ago and never torn down. It would be occupied even in winter, probably, because in this part of town anything that broke the wind counted as habitable, but it had great burned holes in the walls and only beams left for a roof. The ground floor was somewhat sheltered, because the fire had started in the chimney and spread up faster than down, leaving most of a ceiling. When the rats came through, it had been crowded here, and almost no one had been sober enough to get out. Only the one ghost pole had been nailed to the least-burned rafters. She wondered if anyone was going to do anything about the ghosts of the other victims.

"Fuck," Mr. Merrick said, looking around. That was another thing that could have gone either way: did he cuss around her because he didn't respect her, which she had seen plenty of, or did he respect her enough to respect that she didn't give a fuck about language, which she almost never saw?

The practitioner's body was laid out on a bit of old canvas with something like respect. The others were stacked tidily to one side, three deep, and someone had washed the floor. She didn't need to get close to see the bites, or to feel the tingle of practice. She couldn't make herself walk into that room. The implication that business would resume as soon as the inconvenient practitioner was buried chilled her as the morning's horror on Ratcliffe Highway had not. Worse, the longer she stood in that doorway, the more she could feel. She didn't have Joss's awareness, thank fucking God, but strong auras came to her up through her legs, turning to cramps in the muscle of her back. This wasn't the first time a few dozen men died here. The building had been full when it burned. More inhabitants had dropped off in ones and twos over the years, from too much opium, too little food, or each other's desperation. Starvation, suffocation, burning, and the very recent pricks of claws rose up her spine, getting stronger.

If there had been anything to fight or any use in staying, she might have, but as it was she turned on her heel and ran.

 

Mr. Merrick tracked her down maybe half an hour later. She was surprised, both that he'd bothered now that she didn't need an interpreter and that he'd managed. Usually once she got airborne she was home free, but here he was, hauling himself up over a clogged gutter. He couldn't manage grace, but he didn't make it look hard, either. "That was fast," she said.

"Didn't waste time on the ground." He eyed her. If he asked if she was all right she was going to push him off the roof. Instead, he sat down next to her and handed her a flask.

"Thanks." She expected gin and got brandy, but at least it was strong. She hadn't gotten drunk since she was twelve, not for lack of trying, but the burn on her tongue had been her one comfort in a time when she needed it, and she still craved it. She took another slow pull, letting the alcohol absorb through her mouth, and looked out over the rooftops with her elbows on her knees and the flask dangling from her fingers. Mr. Merrick was silent, making her feel childish and cowardly just by sitting there. "Just some addicts, I guess," she said. "No great loss."

Mr. Merrick shifted and when she glanced at him his face was hard. She'd only meant to cover over her own weakness, but apparently she'd said the wrong thing. She offered him his flask back and he waved it away curtly, but when he spoke his voice was calm. "Casualties of war," he said.

She sat up straighter. "The rats are part of some kinda war?"

"Not the rats. The opium. We English got as many Chinese addicted to the junk as we could, so we could trade it to them for tea. Nevermind that we destroyed good people's lives."

"Oh." She could gladly have fallen through the roof right then.

He glanced at her and then looked back out. "Crane and I ran tea back and forth and every which way inside China, but we don't sell it here and we drink coffee. But you didn't know."

Saint grimaced. "Shouldn't'a had to," she said. "Seein' as the blue ruin's been my best friend since I was old enough to steal a bottle."

He tipped his head in acknowledgement. Most of his cropped hair was gray, but she could see it used to be dark. He held out a hand and she passed the flask, and this time he took a sip.

"How old are you?" she asked, and this was not her day for talking like a woman with a brain, now was it.

"Too damn old," he said. "I'm forty-five. Never thought I'd see thirty. You?"

"Eighteen, and I almost didn't see ten, and I may not see twenty." The urge to crack him open and see what was inside was getting stronger. If this man, unskilled and a killer like her, had lived to get old and seen what he'd seen and still had a laugh with real happiness in it, she wanted to know how. Well, there was an easy way to get men to loosen up. "You work around here. Where do you go for a spot to drink?"


	2. Sex Ed for Practitioners

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bit right after the climactic battle of Case of Possession, and then Saint talking to Dr. Gold

The next day was the worst Friday of Merrick's life, beating out the hairball incident mostly by virtue of his hangover, although nearly losing Vaudrey to a  _ wugu _ again, seeing the violently dead corpses of two people he'd been on good terms with for a decade, and strangling a friend in cold blood didn't help either. After all that, it was almost a relief to carry bodies around at Mrs. Gold's direction. This was not Merrick's first time tidying away the evidence, and rather than anticlimax it always struck him as cleansing, as if the world itself could be put to rights by washing off the blood. If he had been a religious man, he suspected he might have ascribed holy properties to the solvents appropriate to different fabrics.

And after the after, when Mrs. Gold left, it was only natural to go find an Old Tom and a climbable rooftop. Saint was in slightly better shape than he was and they were clear now on their respective alcohol tolerances, so he was only sipping. He thought it might be a very bad idea to lose control around Miss Saint again. That said, if she tried to sympathize about Monk Humphris, he was going to drain the bottle as the easiest way to get out of talking.

"I figured out what you are to Lord Crane," she said, still facing the skyline but smirking at him anyway.

"And what's that?" Merrick asked, considering whether to deflect accusations without denying them, as a screen for Mr. Day. Surprisingly few people assumed Vaudrey took him to bed: the English thought servants were beneath a lord, and the China hands knew the stories.

"You're his mum," she said, and laughed as gin burned up through Merrick's nostrils. "You kill for him, you cook and clean for him, you dress him up pretty. He's the apple of your eye, that's why he spends the money and you don't. Ain't it."

"I'm the only one as can thrash him when he deserves it, don't forget that," Merrick said. He dug out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

Saint lay back against the roof, squirming her hips around to get comfortable. Trousers suited her a lot better than skirts, he thought. "Got any other family?"

He had had, a few times. "Not anymore. Maybe Leo Hart, call her something like a niece. You?"

"Nope." She hoisted the bottle. "To dead family." She took a swig and handed it over. He drank in his turn, scooted up a bit, lay back beside her. The roof was astonishingly uncomfortable, sitting or lying. The tiles had a wave to them that dug into his arse. He rolled up onto one elbow, looking at her. She had her head pillowed on one arm, the other on her belly. Her hair stuck out every which way now that her cap was shoved in her pocket.

He was conscious that drinking with her again was probably a very bad idea. Eighteen, bugger it all. At eighteen he'd thought boxing had rules, and also that he was very good at it. He'd lost his first fight for money at nineteen and resigned himself to a life of dock labor.

She craned her neck to look up at him. "My name's Jenny," she said, and looked away again.

"Frank."

They fell back into silence. He shifted his weight and sat up, trying to find a position that wouldn't leave bruises.

"You don't have to stay," she said. "You can go home to bed."

"I'm all right." What Merrick wanted was a good wash, but considering Mrs. Gold had told Mr. Day to spend the night, home wasn't so appealing. The noises he was well used to ignoring, since there hadn't always been walls between his bed and Vaudrey's, but if he stayed away long enough sometimes Mr. Day's sense of shame meant he started the clean-up himself when Vaudrey wasn't looking. Also, considering some of the things those two got up to, Merrick was slightly concerned that if he walked in at the wrong time he might abruptly find himself bleeding from the eyes. He'd seen the sequence of expressions on Mr. Day's face during the incident in the library at Piper. There was no way he could explain that to Mr. Day's student, and they'd been sitting in silence for a minute now, so he changed the subject. "How'd you end up in this racket, anyway?" he asked. "Don't seem to suit you exactly."

She scrunched up her nose. All her expressions were exaggerated by Merrick's standards, especially compared to Chinese faces that conveyed whole dramas in a tiny flick of the eyes. "What, because I'm a girl?"

He laughed. "Because you spit when I mention peelers. You don't seem the type to believe in justice."

This time her face went sour, like a baby trying its first lemon. "Be nice if we could have some. It ain't the worst job, I guess, we help people sometimes. Mr. Day and Mrs. Gold ain't awful, and it was this or some kind of prison, so I picked this." She wriggled her shoulders. "I shoulda picked a different roof. I know better than to try and sit on this kind."

"We could go somewhere else," Merrick said, and could have kicked himself.

She sighed. "I have resonance practice tomorrow. I should try and sleep." Something about the way she hunched into herself as she said it made Merrick uncomfortable, like it called up a bad memory he couldn't place. Then when she sat up and looked at him, the way her eyes lightened made his heart leap, and fuck it all, that wasn't good, even if she just needed a friend. "I have my half day on Wednesdays," she said, "if you wanted to talk more."

 

*°*

 

Saint wasn't stupid, despite the frankly annoying frequency with which she had to remind others of that fact. Herself, even, when it had been five years of tutoring and all the books she could want, and she still had to make excuses when one of her teachers offered to write down a spell for her to study. Everyone assumed she was going to learn to read any day now. Mr. Day, with infinite and unrelenting patience, was still trying to teach her.

There was something wrong other than her being stupid, she was sure of it, but that didn't mean she could fix it. And it meant that when she wanted to learn about practice, she had to find someone to teach her. But she wasn't a coward either, and she knew plenty of girls who weren't stupid and got into trouble anyhow, so she braced herself and showed up at Devonshire Street.

"Hiya, Doc," she said, as the nurse let her in. The consulting room was a mix, memory wise: on the one hand, she was usually in one sort of agony or another when she came here; on the other, it was the only place in the world anyone took care of her but herself. The smell of disinfectant and old books made her want to scratch her nose, but the warmth of Dr. Gold's practice rising up through her feet was a comfort.

"Saint?" Dr. Gold took in her unhurried air and was obviously checking her for wounds. "Esther's out working."

"I know. I needed to ask some questions, and I thought you might know." She was very, very glad she wasn't the type to blush about this. Want to puke from awkwardness, sure, but not even Dr. Gold could see that. She perched on the edge of the couch while he settled back into his chair. "I think I found a man I might want to tup, and-"

"Are you sure you don't want Esther?"

Saint just looked at him.

He sighed. "Go on."

"And half the people who looked out for me before I met you was whores, so I know everything I need to about that part. I ain't a child. But I also don't want to  _ have _ a child, and I need to know about, well. Two things." She swallowed, not on her own account this time. Blunt, unembarrassed Dr. Gold was the only person she could ask about this, but it wasn't kind to come to him about it. "First thing, I know all the whore's tricks to have a cock in me and not get in trouble, but I know they don't always work." Saint had reason to suspect that her own existence was due to a failure of that sort. "If you know anything better, that's what I want. And I need to know what to expect if it doesn't work." She shot him a look. "I can't stay on the ground for nine months, not for anything."

The doctor looked a little stunned. Not too hurt, fortunately. She supposed he had to talk to other patients about losing babies, sometimes. "I see why you couldn't say that to Esther," he said. "She'd track the fellow down. Well, the second part's easy, I can talk you through how to have an early miscarriage, since we, ah, have evidence that it's difficult for practitioners to carry a pregnancy to term. It hurts, but it's a lot less likely to kill you than any of your other hobbies. I don't know if just windwalking will do it, but stripping yourself even a little definitely will." He paused. "Probably safer that way than whatever your old friends use. If you ever decide you do want to carry a child-" he paused. "Hopefully by the time it's relevant, I'll have advice for you. I know it's not impossible."

Saint shrugged. She liked children, but had no intention of attempting to support one on a justiciar's salary, and the thought of imprisonment in a waddling, disobedient body made her shake. There were plenty of foundlings, if she decided she wanted a baby. Doc Gold didn't need to know any of that. "All right," she said.

"For the first part, there's not much practice can do unless you have the knack for it, but there's plenty of old craft that might help. Can you wait a couple days for me to read up and experiment? I don't want to give you something that won't work."

"I can wait," Saint said, and wondered whether she even had anything to wait for. She'd spent almost a whole night out with Frank, drinking and talking, but not touching. Frank looked at her sometimes, but- again, she wasn't stupid- she had no intention of seducing him. He had to want her with his eyes open or it was no good. She honestly suspected nothing was going to happen, but she refused to miss an opportunity for lack of preparation. If she and Frank didn't work out, she would find someone else eventually. She refused to let wanting sex make her an idiot, and that meant thinking about where she was going to get it, because she knew way too many stories to believe keeping her knees together was going to do any good at all, and thinking about the men she knew was getting distracting. All of the men she knew: that was the worst part of being eighteen. She might proposition Joss, if he ever grew up a bit, although if three years as a junior justiciar hadn't given him perspective she didn't know what would. Better someone safe and not too much more powerful than her, if she couldn't have someone she genuinely wanted, than let herself get taken advantage of.

Being practical didn't stop her from thinking about what it would be like, if it was Frank. He was experienced, strong, with eyes worth looking at and a face whose irregularities she was on her way to memorizing, but it was his habit of listening without saying anything stupid that was knocking her head over heels. Experience was all well and good, but plenty of her old friends' customers had been experienced and still known nothing about giving pleasure. She suspected Frank was not like that. If he turned out to be, she could keep looking. The power to leave seemed to be the key difference between having a fling that didn't work out and letting someone fuck you over, from what whores said, and Jenny was resolved that nothing and no one was going to trap and use her. She could always run.

The doctor was watching her think, and she squirmed a bit. He wasn't much like a da, but she'd never had anyone closer. She was ashamed that she thought sometimes about what he might be like in bed. She thought about  _ everyone _ and it was getting fucking old. He was Esther's husband, for fuck's sake. "I assume your other friends talked to you about the pox, and all the other infections you can get," he said.

She nodded. "You've cured those, though, for other people I mean."

"I have, most of them, yes, but I hope I won't need to. You're a practitioner, and this is one way that can be very useful. The spell to detect the common conditions is easy enough. The pox, the clap. There are blisters and warts you can get that are harder to detect, but if you get those, bring them to me."

Saint thought about all the uses of that spell and swallowed. "Teach me," she said. "How hard is the cure?"

He shook his head. "The cure isn't a field procedure, and you don't have the background. If he's poxed, send him to me. If he won't come, don't sleep with him."

Saint grinned. "If he won't come, he ain't sleeping with anyone. Don't worry." Dr. Gold's expression was completely satisfying, and he started teaching her the spell as a way to change the subject. They cast it back and forth on each other until she was sure she could do it on her own, and she went back to her studies in the council building by way of the rooftops, just to try and settle the bubbles of fear and hope. Also, to try to stop fantasizing about how much good she could do by casting that spell on potential johns and making sure the ones with the pox didn't spread it, one way or another. If practice weren't such a fucking secret, she could probably earn three times her salary working in a brothel. Well, she could anyway, but that was saying more about the council's idea of a budget than about her. Then again, she could just imagine sending some pox-mad would-be customer away and having him come back armed. Whores knowing what's what was never the problem. She could deal with it in ways whores couldn't, but then the council would send in Macready. Abuse of power, they'd call that. Wankers.


	3. The Perils of Drink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night of Case of Spirits, Jenny and Frank go to a dubious Old Tom.

Wednesday was just as hot and miserable as Tuesday, and the morning's work was worse. Saint had never had a weak stomach for bodily fluids and was getting more blasé about violent death, but there were parts of her job that were getting less tolerable instead of more, the longer she worked. Joss and Mrs. Gold had woken her in the wee hours to talk to the kind of people where her accent was a help, and over the next few hours she'd pieced together a story of starvation, desperation, disease, and a slow almost involuntary slide into stripping people. Even that was worse than usual, because there had been so many missed chances: the first victims were old or sick, dying anyway, except for one who was a bully and a murderer. If the justiciary had the people to keep on top of situations, it might never have gotten to daylight murder of an innocent man. The witnesses were angry and terrified, and the culprit stripped herself to death fighting rather than be taken. Saint would have argued for mercy.

Through the whole ordeal she could feel a storm coming, and the surge of etheric power through her lungs that was usually exhilarating only made her tense, angrier than usual, and fast and strong enough to dodge a warlock's dying curse. In this weather, she wondered sometimes whether she might be able to beat Mr. Day in a fair fight. If he got a spell off she was done, but she was as fast with the ether as with her legs. Had to be, of course, or she'd fall. So if she could take him out with one blow, she could win. Usually these thoughts were purely theoretical, of course. As annoying and high-handed as he could be sometimes, he cared about her and took her seriously as far as he knew how, and usually she was just grateful enough to forgive being talked down to. Today, as he delayed her departure for home and a drink to offer clumsy sympathy and tell her she'd done the right thing, she was tempted to blast him into self-righteous pulp. 

She wanted home, a drink, and Frank Merrick. He was a different kind of temptation, and could handle her bad moods. She had yet to see anything actually upset him, even when he was drunk, and although they'd only known each other two weeks, there had been opportunities. He'd killed a helpless man and shrugged it off. That, she reflected, was maybe not the smartest thing to find comforting, but somehow the memory of what he looked like as he did it made her want to run her hands over his scarred face. She hadn't, yet, because she was afraid of learning he didn't see her that way. She was used to contempt in general, and had learned to ignore it early, but Frank was inside her defenses somehow. She wanted his good opinion even more than she wanted his skin. Tonight, she had decided, she would ask, and hope that if he said no they could still talk.

She washed up before she went out, which she wouldn't always have done, but it was hot and she reeked of sweat, blood, and burning hair. The three sets of boy's clothes she wore for work were basically the same, and one of them was cleaner than what she had on, close to being actually clean. She had expected Frank's advice on removing stains to be as useless as the advice of any rich person about anything, but instead his recipes involved things she could scavenge or buy for a penny: ashes, vinegar, even piss. She was still thinking about whether she wanted to try that last one. She put the dirty sets in a bucket to soak, combed her hair and tied it up again, and felt very nearly respectable.

They met on Lower Thames Street and strolled along looking for a drink, not talking about much in particular, because when he was sober Frank was downright intimidating. They happened across a party--either a wake or a wedding, it wasn't clear--and let themselves be drawn into the bonhomie of drunken strangers. The Abstinence League was out in force tonight, but the drinkers, Jenny and Frank among them, chose to drown them out with singing rude songs rather than start a brawl. Some wag started a game of calling the green-sashed abstainers "maypoles," and circle dances formed around them, holding hands, skipping, and crashing into each other because only one or two of the dancers were country bred and had ever seen a real maypole. Jenny wasn't drunk on the gin and cheap wine, but she was drunk on the weather and the music, and for a few minutes letting a stranger on one side and Frank on the other fling her around was nearly as good as flying.

She stumbled them into an alley when the circle dance fell apart. Frank had been drinking, but not enough yet to do more than loosen his smile, and his eyes were keen on her as she laughed and caught her breath. They weren't the only couple in the shadows here, but none of the others would notice or care, any more than Jenny cared. She had Frank, and sod it, she was going to do this or it would never happen. She gave him just a little push through the ether to tip him against the wall, put her hand on his chest, and stepped up into the air just long enough to brush her lips across his.

It was like being stabbed: first nothing, then all the sensation came at once, and while she was still feeling it he'd caught her by the hips and brought their mouths back together. She knew there was a way to kiss with your mouth open, but she didn't know why anyone bothered, when just putting your lips on someone felt like this. She was more aware of her breasts than she'd ever been, and she felt his fingers on her arse all through her muscles like the throb of practice. Her feet were filthy; she bent them back and braced her knees around his waist, and kissed him more. Finally, finally, she could bring her hands up and run her thumbs over his cheekbones, brush a fingertip over the crescent-moon scar at his temple. He pulled back just far enough to suck in air and she kissed his chin, his jaw, and his broken nose. She thought she might die from joy and need, because this was real, the whole shitty day was worth it for this.

But then he closed his eyes, sighed, tipped his forehead against hers. His voice was deep and ragged, but what he said was "Bugger. Jen. No."

She let go with her knees and let him set her down. She wouldn't faint, or wobble, or bloody cry. She felt her heart and muscles becoming old hard leather again. "No?" And because she had practiced, she could say, "All right then. Sorry," and shrug like she meant it, and turn away.

It was like being stabbed: at first nothing. But she was bloody well not going to cry. Not with him there. "Let's keep walking, then," she said, because she couldn't keep still.

They ambled along in silence. Jenny was keeping an eye out for a black cat sign, because she definitely needed a drink now. She didn't look at Frank and had no idea what he was thinking.

"It ain't I don't like you," he said, as they turned onto Rood Lane. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Why the fuck did he think talking was going to help? "And it ain't I don't want you."

She snorted. "Don't want to bring me home to his lordship? I ain't asking to move in. I thought I might give you a back-alley tug and go home happy."

He stopped, grabbed her arm, spun her to face him, and his face was still unreadable but there was fire in his eyes. "Jen, don't you dare think you ain't good enough for me, or for any lord, for that matter."

She jerked out of his grip and crossed her arms on her chest. "You don't need to look after my feelings, Mr. Merrick. I can look after myself. I know my strength and I know my place."

"Your place is-"

"My mum was a whore." It wasn't the first time she'd said that, in an argument. She'd screamed it at Mr. Day more than once, and he kept telling her it didn't make a difference, as if he knew better than her what mattered. This was the first time it had hurt to say.

"So was- so was a lot of my friends, come to that," Frank said.

"And I'm sure you never fucked a one of 'em, right? Go to hell."

He was getting angry, but pretending to hold it together like men did to try and seem strong. "Jenny, you're eighteen," he said, as if this was some conclusive fact she might have overlooked.

"I am. I'm eighteen. And if Mrs. Gold didn't come after me for windwalking I'd have been fucked in alleys for years already, because it's steadier work than stealing. It's just bodies, Frank. Just skin and sweat and spunk. I ain't afraid of it. I thought you might be a good time, and who else do I have, but if you think I'm a little girl as should grow up to be a lady, well, bugger you and I can go back to that party."

He was still close and intense. "It ain't just skin, it never is, not even for whores. We're friends, or we were, and who do you have but me to go to when it goes wrong?"

"You act like I never had awful things happen to me before. I ain't weak, and I don't mean because I could break your ribs with a finger. I don't need anyone."

He shook his head. "I ain't weak either and I still have friends. Crane, and people I know from China, and people I've got business with here. Who do you have?"

Saint didn't want to think about that, but she didn't want to concede, either. "If anyone hurt me and I let on, Mr. Day and Mrs. Gold would make them regret it. And Joss, in a pinch, I guess."

"Ain't what I mean. Who do you have who knows when you're broken without you saying, who can help you see clear when you think you're not doing right by your lover?"

Jenny sputtered. "I ain't got Lord Crane like you have, but I kill when Mr. Day and Mrs. Gold say so, so don't you go thinking we're so different. And you know what?" she added, as his face darkened, "Everyone is so concerned with what I don't have, they can't see what I do. Mr. Day keeps trying to teach me to read instead of letting me run, and Mrs. Gold wants me to have a decent dress and do up my hair pretty when trousers let me fly, and you won't let me have a quick poke in an alley because I ain't got an earl for family, so you can all fuck off. We're drinking buddies, that's all, right? Let's get a drink."

He drank as much gin in a go as she'd yet seen him take. Victory, hah. As she was draining her own cup the rain came at last, sluicing down like judgment. He turned his face up to it with a drunken grimace. "Sodding rain. I'm for home."

For the first few minutes after he left, Jenny stood in a doorway, shaking and finally sobbing now that no one could see. She missed the first signs of trouble in her misery. By the time she realized the cramp in her stomach and her eyes was more than frustration, it was too late to catch him. She ran in a straight line for Devonshire Street, terrified she might not get there sober enough to tell them to look for him.

And so, when the ghosts came, Paris Mama and Nigel and too damn many warlocks, he was there, too. It was unlucky, and lucky, the Golds had forgotten his given name.


	4. The Hangover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath of Case of Spirits, with snuggles.

The night after, when Vaudrey would have kept by him, Frank just said he needed to go out, and went to find her. Jenny had said she didn't have anyone else, and a chance remark of Mrs. Gold's, as she finished her cure, revealed her student had gone home to lick her wounds.

Frank had held people, and been held, when you felt like arms was all that was keeping the parts of you together. There had been Amy Pessell, after Hector; and Vaudrey, after his fifth or sixth customer, when bullheaded optimism stopped being enough; then Vaudrey holding him, a few weeks later, through the accumulated pain of bruises and fractures that never had time to heal; and Yuan-yuan holding him when the news about his parents finally found him, three years too late; and Vaudrey holding him again after Yuan-yuan, with a grip not unlike the one he had on Vaudrey while Mr. Day took apart the Judas jack. 

When he picked the lock at her lodgings, because no landlady in this neighborhood was going to let him in without an argument, and knocked on Saint's door, and she clung to him, that was the first time it had ever been mutual. Neither one of them was there to comfort the other because both of them were in too much pain, and somehow there was comfort between them anyway. He wept hard into her hair. He cried for all his ghosts, but most of all for sunny, laughing Yuan-yuan. She had loved silk and flowers, and had shown her love for him in screaming arguments about nothing, because he was the only one she ever cared enough about to lose her temper. He cried for his wife, and a skinny orphan shaman wrapped her arms around him and soaked his jacket with tears, and he didn't know how anything could be such a simple comfort and such complicated agony at the same time.

They lay together on Saint's hard narrow bed for hours without speaking a word. Eventually they took a break to piss and find a cup of water, and in the jakes with his hand on his cock, Merrick thought about touch hunger. He'd told the truth, that skin was never just skin. Even with whores you paid for more than a warm wet hole to put your cock in, you paid to touch another human being. He wondered how long it had been since Saint had anyone to hold her.

When he got back to her room, he pulled off his jacket and shirt while she watched from the bed. She was wrung-out, blank-faced, but she came to him when he held out an arm. He pulled her on top of him since there really wasn't enough bed to lie side by side, and she nestled into his chest like a cat. For a moment she was as fluid as a cat, too, but then she tipped her head up, opened one eye, and poked his amulet with a fingernail. "What's that?" she asked.

"A shaman gave it to me for protection," he said.

She poked it again, with fingertips this time. "You get in many fights with shamans?" she asked.

"He was hiring me to kill one when he made it. A bad one, I guess you'd say a warlock." Which sometimes Merrick forgot, because he'd picked one lock, walked into a house during a party, shot the  _ wugu _ in the back of the head from hiding, and been out and gone before any of the guests gave chase. Easiest shaman business he'd ever done. There hadn't been any evidence of particular depravity that he'd seen, but he wasn't going to say no to Yu Len.

Saint put her head back down, yawned. She wriggled against him, made a tiny  _ mm _ noise, and fell asleep. To his surprise, Merrick dozed off a little after.

He woke, not much later, when she shifted in her sleep. She was drooling on him because her nose was still stuffy from so much crying. His back and one shoulder ached, less from her weight than from sleeping in a slightly off-center position to keep from dropping her on the floor. He didn't move. He thought briefly of Yuan-yuan, and how they slept back to back so often when exhaustion caught them in the middle of a fight, but then he deliberately turned to a more recent memory. The last time a woman slept on him like this, it was the courtesan Tiger Fur, and they had woken together like this to the sound of Vaudrey talking. What a morning that had been, the day the letter from the lawyers came. Tiger Fur had liked him well enough and liked his money better, and he had been willing to pay for company as an alternative to accidentally raising hopes and getting stabbed again, and for some reason she and Vaudrey had struck up a surprisingly sincere friendship, where Vaudrey tended to give his women a wide berth. While they slept in their alcove, unbeknownst to him, an assassin had knocked on the door in the night, some sort of revenge thing about a colleague Merrick had taken care of professionally. Vaudrey, being Vaudrey, had seduced the poor man to keep from having to wake Merrick with the noise of murder, and so when Merrick woke up it was to overhear a conversation about the comparative value of Vaudrey's cocksucking and his own life. Tiger Fur had almost died from smothering her laughter. And then, while they were all four drinking tea, with Merrick and the would-be assassin sizing each other up and Vaudrey and Tiger Fur conducting a commentary entirely in literary allusions and eyebrows, the English message-runner delivered the letter, and Vaudrey had turned to the muscle and said, "Well, you can't kill Merrick now. It turns out I'm an earl, the bragging rights for last night should keep you in wine for life." But his delivery had been spoiled by having to explain what an earl was, while Merrick tried to get his hands on the letter. Vaudrey had a habit of making serious moments ridiculous that way.

That easy companionship of equals was eroding in the face of English ideas of what an earl ought to be. It was all right, because the friendship underneath was still there, but Merrick missed it anyway. He wondered sometimes whether it hadn't been a mistake to start calling Vaudrey "my lord," but he refused to call his friend Crane as if being an earl was just a name change, or Vaudrey as if nothing was different. By the time they decided to come to England, he'd been in the habit already, and it was stupid to change away from what everyone expected, if he was going to wear black. And, damnit, Vaudrey's reputation and the ridiculous English laws meant they couldn't live together as just friends even though they weren't fucking. It had made sense. But sometimes Merrick wondered whether Vaudrey was forgetting it was a game.

Saint snuffled, adjusted a couple times unconsciously trying to get her face out of the slimy spot, unbalanced to the point where he had to put a knee up to keep her from falling, and woke. Her hands made little clutching movements against his ribs, and she made a soft sad noise between a grunt and a moan. That went to his heart as the drowning grief of the night before had not. "I'm squashing you," she said.

"I'm all right," he said, as she noticed the puddle and tried to mop it up with her sleeve. "You don't weigh much."

"Did I wake you up?"

"Nah. I was thinking."

"Remembering?"

"Good memories." Well, in comparison.

She propped her elbows on his chest and twisted her head back and forth to stretch her neck. "Wish I had more of those."

Her elbows were sharp and not comfortable. He didn't care. "Need to talk?" he asked.

Her eyes were very slightly luminous in the pitch dark of her room. He couldn't see anything else and wondered if she could. She looked down and away. "You should probably go home and get sleep, after the last coupla days."

"Sounds like you need to talk."

"Yeah well."

"We're still friends, Jenny."

She sighed. "Friends is one thing. This is secrets some of my friends might kill me for. Which may or may not be secrets anymore, although I think Mrs. Gold would've said. I dreamed- ugh. Just my luck, the first time I manage to get tipsy in six years and it's that stuff."

There were a limited number of possible secrets she could be keeping. She didn't have that many friends, and she knew they didn't kill lightly. "You're a warlock?" he asked, trying to be alarmed and failing. If she was, she still wasn't going to hurt him.

She reared up so hard he thought her armbones were probably leaving bruises. "No! I never- ew. I may not get as much power from the air as Mr. Day, but I got plenty for what I do. Ew."

He let the silence sit, relaxing as much as he could under her weight until she relaxed, too, snuggling back down against him. She tucked her head into the curve of his chin. Her hair tickled. He put a hand on the small of her back, just the tiniest pressure in his fingertips.

"I did kill a man with practice, though, as soon as I learned enough fluence to be sure I could get away with it."

He knew, but did not say, that Mr. Day was more concerned with habits than single crimes. For all she talked about being a killer, if this girl in his arms was still feeling guilt for someone she killed on purpose years ago, she was all right. "I'm guessing this bloke had it coming," was what he said.

"No fucking kidding. Right bastard and no mistake. And no way to get it done but practice, either. He was a canny one, and a peeler. And if I'd dropped him with practice the justiciary would've been all over me. So I had to fluence him out to meet me, hold him still, and then do him with a knife. At least I got to keep his money. Ten quid in his pockets and couldn't be arsed to pay his whores."

"Did he hurt you?"

"No, I stabbed him- oh, you mean before? Wait, are you trying to ask if he raped me? You can say the word, I ain't a lady. No, he didn't. He kicked me out of his way once, that was the worst he did to me personal-like. But he was the one who killed Paris Mama, and she was the best person I ever met, and my only regret is I did it too fast because I was scared of getting caught."

He hugged her close, tender and proud as if he had anything to do with it. "Sounds like you made a good job of it."

"Well, I got away clean and no one ever suspected it was anything but robbery. So I did what I aimed to do."

He kissed the top of her head.

Jenny blew out her breath, half-laughing and half an exasperated sigh. "Go back to sleep, Frank. You're sweet, but don't piss me about."

He did, and in the hour before sunrise he put his shirt back on and gave her a hug before he went to make Vaudrey's breakfast.


	5. Happy Feet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here there be smut.

They met up again the next Wednesday, because at that point, whatever was going on between them, it wasn't done. They got a bit of gin from an Old Tom, a safe one they'd been to before and even so Jenny took the first taste, and stood sipping in the twilight street. The brim of her cap shaded her eyes, and for once he wasn't sure what she was thinking. "Where to?" Frank asked.

She gave her body a little twisting stretch. "Dunno. I want to move. They had me doing resonance drills with Joss all morning. I'm bloody sick of resonance."

"Walk? Run? Swim?"

She made a face. "What I want to do is spar, but I don't know where we'd go."

Merrick sparred with Vaudrey at their gym, but he couldn't take Saint there. Partly she was female, although he would have pushed to get her in if that was all. More importantly, he suspected sparring would be a lot more fun and more fair if she could move properly. "Can you-" he gestured, bouncing a hand back and forth.

"Windwalk?"

"Can you windwalk indoors, or does there have to be wind?" He'd seen her take a couple steps up to kick Town Cryer in a basement, but that was nothing like what she did on the rooftops.

She shrugged. Her hands were shoved hard in her pockets and her shoulders were tight from holding still. "Just has to be space for me to keep moving."

"Then come on, I got a place we can use."

Most of the warehouse space he and Vaudrey used was rented, since they didn't plan on staying and didn't want the bother of management, but they owned the offices and a couple more buildings to prevent rivals from stranding their goods entirely. The biggest one was about a third full right now, mostly crates of silk in long-term storage while they sold it off slowly. The different grades and colors were sorted for ease of sale, and there were irregular spaces between the rows where some of it had sold already. In places, the crates were stacked almost to the two-story ceiling, out of the possibility of damp, but fully half the room was clear open space. He lit a couple of lanterns and had the guards move their card game outside. The moment the door closed behind them, Saint was in the air. She danced a little circle around the block and tackle setup they used for loading and unloading, swung back and forth on it, kicked off the wall to slide it on its track the length of the room, then dashed back through the air to drop grinning beside him. "Yeah, this'll do, I guess," she said. "Do I need to be careful about whatever's in those big boxes?"

Merrick rolled his eyes. "We ain't paying guards out of charity. You can stand on the crates, but don't blast 'em open."

She made a little "aw" face and jumped up to kick him in the chest.

He saw it coming, and even so he barely got an arm up to knock the blow aside. Her technique was shit, as you might expect from an English street urchin, but she was strong for her size and fast for anyone. He bit his tongue against offering advice. That wasn't what she needed tonight. He remembered what she'd said the day they met about time to line up a shot, so he started moving. At least she had the sense to keep her distance, bouncing into the air and back, instead of closing to try to pin him down. He saw she was trying to get behind him, probably a sound strategy in general, but he wasn't here to let her win. He let her vault over him, but when she tried to kick the back of his head, he grabbed the foot she was standing on and pulled forward. She didn't unbalance quite the way he expected, he could feel her bounce off the air, but it gave him enough time to twist around. In a real fight, this would be the time for a punch to the gut or the chin. Instead he yanked her cap off, dropped her foot, and hopped back grinning at the look on her face.

She tried a couple more maneuvers, bouncing back and forth over his head, but didn't go for a kick. Instead, halfway through yet another vault, she turned mid-air and dropped straight down beside him. As he ducked and kicked, she got a hand around his wrist. For a second he thought she might try some sort of throw, but instead she said, "Listen to me, take your jacket off," and let go.

Merrick had been fluenced before, once, but despite the nightmares and Vaudrey's help he couldn't remember anything about the actual process. This was not like that. He found himself shrugging his jacket off as if his arms were on strings, but he was perfectly aware of why it was happening. She'd been deliberately clumsy, and she was looking at him now with a challenge shining in her eyes. "Never do that to Crane," he said. "He'll fight back first and regret it after."

For just a second, her jaw tightened and lifted. "I ain't trying to flirt with your bird, and I won't hurt him neither. We sparring or what?"

"You're trying to flirt with me?" He could have kicked himself. Of course she was, and of course he was, and they could have had a lovely time.

Those blue eyes made cold glares glacial. "You started it. This time, I mean."

He could see now that she was still vibrating with pent-up energy. Her glare stayed frozen, but the tip of her tongue flicked out to wet her lips. He could back away now, but it would mean sacrificing their friendship. Even as he had the thought, he knew it was dishonest. He was hardly thinking about kissing her again just to be a good friend. But still, she was eighteen. "I make no promises," he said, and she made a rude noise and a rude gesture. "I mean it. I ain't promising to sleep with you, and I ain't promising I'll still want to kiss you tomorrow. I ain't promising anything even though you think you don't need promises. And you don't owe me anything either. I got no expectations."

She cocked her head, sharp and starling-like. "Right, I know that. And you know I won't fluence you if you don't want?"

"I know." He skipped forward, feinting an ankle sweep. She dodged up, of course, and he caught her ankle again. Her shoe came right off in his hand. She was learning: this time she pushed off the air with one hand and scissored her other foot across towards his face. He ducked and took a glancing blow to the top of his head.

The next time they paused, it was because she'd made him take his shirt off and was getting her first good look at his back. By that point she was barefoot, and it turned out she could fluence him when he grabbed a bare ankle. "Bloody hell, Frank, what happened to you?" she asked as he tossed his shirt aside.

He glanced at her over his shoulder but didn't turn around. Her expression was more horror than pity. Vaudrey had the one big broken-bottle scar across his back, that the Three Tiger Claw's artist had turned into a perch. Frank had gone under the needle with the stripes of his flogging for a canvas, and then lived the life of a Shanghai bravo for another seventeen years. He felt Jenny's fingers lightly on his skin and shivered as they stroked his leprous elephant, then bumped over what was left of his castle's crenellations. "A lot happened," he said, as she laid her palm over the mess from the bullet that punctured his lung.

"You survived," she whispered.

He cleared his throat. "Don't make too much of it," he said. "I paid a lot of money and more in favors to the shaman who got me through that." Her hand was living and warm, callused, rough. He knew more than he wanted to about how Mr. Day's hands felt, thanks to Vaudrey's magic drunkenness that first night and occasional remarks since then. Jenny's weren't like that. There was almost nothing magic in them at all. But as she spread them both, laying her fingers like wings over his shoulder blades, he felt a flowing coolness against his skin, as if there was air where he knew there wasn't, or as if she might dissolve into the wind at any moment. It made him want to gather her into his arms. For a moment he thought about it.

While he hesitated, she must have felt the tension in him. She slid her own arms around his chest and waist. Her cheek came to rest against his scars, her muscled belly relaxing into softness against his arse. When she brushed the breath of a kiss on the old bullet wound, he huffed out a sigh, and there was nothing to do but wrap his arms over hers, hugging her hugging him. They stood like that for a long minute, but finally she pulled back and he let her go. Her cheek was flushed where it had touched him, asymmetrical and beautiful.

He swallowed hard and aimed a quick one-two jab at her head.

He didn't let her win, exactly, but he didn't argue when she started using magic to shove him around, either. He was far too aware of how sodding young she was, and suspected although he hadn't asked outright that she hadn't done this before. There was a risk that it had been done to her, too, and he wasn't going to make any kind of a threatening move. Aside from leaving bruises when she gave him an opening, of course. He would never hit her to humiliate, but hitting her when they sparred was as important as listening to her for showing respect. She needed to feel safe fighting back.

So she still had on her shirt and drawers when he was stark naked, the amulet alone around his neck. He was only half-hard, and she looked at him with slow speculation rather than wild lust. He resented his sobriety. Drunk, it would have been easier to find the joke to make this simple. Instead he had to admit it was complicated and always would be. "It's a beat-up old body," he said finally, "but it's the one I've got." He wasn't ashamed of his skin, generally speaking, or afraid to let women see it, or men either for that matter. He knew the ways of being nude that had nothing to do with nakedness, but this wasn't that. She was just looking at him, and for the second time that evening he didn't know what she thought.

"It suits you," she said finally. The smirk reemerged. "You must of pissed off a lot of people to get that body." Finally she touched him, and of course it was on the one bit of his inner thigh where he had no feeling. Vaudrey had tattoos; Merrick had scars. "Looks like someone tried to take your bollocks off."

"Nearly managed. She went for me while I was sleeping." This was a funny story in the right context, with a happy ending in that no one died, but this was not the right time or place. "It was a misunderstanding. We worked it out."

"Oooh, touchy. That reminds me. Hold still." She slid a foot over to lie on one of his, just their toes overlapping.

She was definitely doing something magic. Her eyes dilated and started glowing a bit, and he could feel the cool touch of her in his veins. He stiffened, in both senses, as her attention concentrated on his groin. "Jenny?"

Her eyes snapped back into focus, although the coolness faded slower. "You ain't poxed. Are you just lucky or haven't you fucked as many people as you want me to think?"

"Lucky. Yu Len had a cure. You have a spell for that?"

"Doc Gold taught me. Been daydreaming all week about going into business."

"You could, in China. Of course you'd have competition, though."

"And I don't speak Chinese. Oh well."

It wasn't that he'd never stood around talking with his prick hanging out, because he had, but it wasn't his favorite thing. Her awkwardness was getting contagious. "Jenny?"

"Mm?"

"Can I kiss you?"

She looked him up and down one last time. "I guess. If you want."

He cursed himself for stopping her last time and landing them in this mess. She'd been confident enough before he gave her reason not to be. Well, now was the time to make amends. He cupped her chin in one hand and bent down to bring their lips together.

It wasn't like last time, because he had been laughing and tipsy and not thinking straight then, where now he was sober and self-conscious, and this time he didn't mean to stop. She might be eighteen, but she knew what she was doing and she deserved a chance. He had no intention of standing in the way of her happiness again. Besides, her lips moved just a little against his (never one to hold still, his Jenny), and her shirt was loose and brushing against his belly, and when he took a breath she put her hands on his waist, skin against skin. He thought maybe he should care more about getting her naked, but he really didn't. He wanted the way she moved, and he could see that just fine with her clothes on. He angled his head a bit, not kissing with tongue yet but putting a little more pressure there, and she twined a bare foot around his calf, digging in with her toes and then fitting the curve of her arch to the curve of his muscle. The cool touch of her magic was much stronger in her feet than her hands. She made a little mewing noise into his kiss.

He wrapped her in his arms and tucked her head under his chin. "Sensitive feet?" he asked.

Her laughter tickled his chest and he tightened his grip so she could put the soles of both feet on his skin. "I never knew. I never put them on anyone before. I cast through them when no one makes me use my hands, and I feel the ether strongest through them, but-" she kissed one of the old stabbing scars where her nose lay against his ribs. "You feel nice."

"Thank you."

"No, I mean-" she waved a hand, then had to grab back onto him to keep from falling. "You feel nice in the ether. Cozy-like."

He snorted, puffing into her hair. "Cozy. I like it." She was still rubbing her feet up and down on his legs, which would have been more ridiculous than sensual if she hadn't been so clearly aroused by it. For one nauseating moment he remembered Yuan-yuan's broken, bound feet in their tiny shoes. Grieved that she had never gotten to do this. He adjusted his grip, lifting Jenny as much because his arms were getting tired as because he wanted to kiss her again, and bundled her up close. She wiggled to get her feet on his arse, overbalanced, and dropped laughing to the floor. He grinned back down at her. "You're fun. And we should find someplace with a bed, or at least a chair. I want to see what happens when I really pay attention to those feet."

Her smirk was almost the same, just more, and it hit him harder now. "Oh, you weren't paying attention? I can help with that." She grabbed one of his hands for balance and twisted a leg up so she could set the sole of one foot against his cock.

They both jolted and almost fell over. Her foot slipped and narrowly avoided kicking him in the balls. "Fuck," he said. "Christ, Jen, yes, but on a chair or something, all right? Oh hell, I can sit on my coat. Come here."

He ended up lying on his back on the pile of his clothes, on a dusty warehouse floor, with her folded up between his knees. After a few adjustments to keep the balls of her feet from pressing too hard in the wrong places, and to nestle her heels gently against him, she wrapped her arms around his thighs and got just enough leverage that she could get a bit of friction. They were both laughing in between spikes of pleasure. There was no way for him to touch her, but she didn't want him to. He had expected her to want caresses and, well, her own orgasm, this first time, but she shook her head when he offered. "I want the bits I can't do for myself, thanks," she said, and he was in no position to complain. He was lost in her over-expressive face, her absorption in him and in using her feet. Everything was so silly and so perfect he didn't realize he was close, didn't have a chance to hold back, and he came with a grunt of surprise all over his belly.

He caught his breath. She sat back, her feet held a bit in the air. It took him a moment to realize she was worried about getting spunk on his clothes. The mixed chagrin, disgust, and fascination on her face were comical. He tugged his drawers out from under his shoulder and handed them to her to clean up with, as the least important of his articles of clothing. One of the weapons in his pockets was digging into his hip. He scooted sideways off it and ended up with his bare arse on the rough floorboards. He rolled to his feet and stretched while he waited his turn for his drawers.

"Was that all right then?" Jen asked, finally deciding her feet were clean enough. She was beautiful in an unexpected way, all mussed. Maybe it was just the aftereffects of sex, but he could see her simple English prettiness behind her insecurity now.

He wiped himself down, trying not to feel like an idiot. "For me, yeah. You? Your face was a sight when I came. I'll try and warn you next time. It snuck up on me."

"No, it- it was what I wanted." She scrubbed a hand across her face, shoving her mouth and nose around like she was loosening them up. "It was yucky and I want to do it again, so I don't know how I feel exactly, all right?"

Merrick barked a laugh, remembering things he hadn't thought of in thirty years. "You know, the first time I got a finger on a woman's cunny I pulled it right back. I didn't know it was supposed to be wet, I thought she pissed on me."

Jenny's hand was clamped tight over her mouth now and she was shaking with laughter.

"Yeah well, I was fifteen. Made an arse of myself worse than that, sometimes. You learn what you like."

It took her three tries to get a word out before she got control of herself. "If I was that bad-"

He held up his drawers, reassuring her even though he wasn't sure that was what she needed. He wasn't putting them back on. He could wear his trousers without. "I didn't come like that because you was bad. Just saying it'll get even better. If you want. Jen, can I kiss you?"

She kissed him hard enough to remind him that only one of them had found satisfaction. "You can stop asking, you know."

"Natural caution, what with you can break my ribs with a finger."

"Yeah sure, but I'm telling you, you can kiss me sometimes, and I can let you know if you can't. Right?"

He kissed her temple and the corner of her jaw. "All right, maybe I will. Next question, since you're a shaman: you hungry?"


End file.
